A third of your day (apart from work and sleep) is supposed to be yours. So where does it go? For centuries among the British upper class, there was no distinction between the Monday-Friday workweek and weekends, because they did not report to any sort of job. We see this in one of the most hilarious lines in the historical drama Downton Abbey, in which the Dowager Countess of Grantham encounters the term “weekend” for the first time. In 1817, labor movement activist Robert Owen coined this...

You're not imagining it. Research shows that distress tolerance, the ability to sit with uncomfortable feelings without immediately trying to escape them, is declining, especially among young people. And it makes sense when you think about the biology. Your muscles get stronger when you stress them, your immune system improves when it encounters germs, and psychological resilience works the same way. You get better at handling difficulty by handling difficulty. So if you've never really had...

I don’t dare mention the number of weeks left, as it’s depressingly low for many of you. (Okay, it also feels too low even for the folks who go back after Labor Day. Shoutout to my fellow NYC folks!) And truthfully, I didn’t need to remind you, because somewhere in the back of your head, there's a countdown running. It happens every year around this time, and it’s dragging along the dreaded question: Is this school year going to be different? Or am I walking back into the exact same grind...